[Cross Posted from Sixteen Small Stones]
It’s been nearly a year since I posted the outline of the Old Testament that had come about through my work with Daniel Bartholomew on our open source ScriptureLog project. We had previously released an outline of the textual structure of the Book of Mormon, and I had intended to move on immediately to making the New Testament available for ScriptureLog and to produce an accompanying outline for it.
However, other projects and responsibilities soon pushed the New Testament work to the back-burner.
With the adult Sunday school curriculum in the LDS church shifting to study the New Testament during 2011, I made an extra effort to get something finished by the end of 2010.
While the update to add the New Testament to the Scripturelog plugin for WordPress might not be available for another week or two, the outline of the New Testament is available for download immediately in PDF format so it can be used and printed by anyone:
An Outline of the New Testament
As with the other outlines, I spent a great deal of time reading commentaries and articles about the New Testament, about the individual books in it, and prayerfully going through the text itself chapter by chapter, and page by page, to try to identify ways to organize the parts.
Rather than attempt a comprehensive outline, I aimed to produce an outline that would help illuminate some of the traditional divisions and relationships in the text, as well as changes in theme, narrative, or focus, by placing structural sign posts to help readers orient themselves as they study.
As with my other efforts to outline scriptures, I came away from this project with a renewed love, and improved understanding of the New Testament, which made the whole endeavor well worth it.
I hope it can also be helpful to others as they prepare for the upcoming 2011 curriculum.
There also have been some minor revisions to my outlines for the Old Testament and The Book of Mormon, including the addition of some PDF bookmarks to make navigating the PDF documents much easier. You can find links to download the newest revisions of any of the outlines on the ScriptureLog Website.
Happy New Year!
Wow, this is great, J Max!
I have recently started work on a ‘personal commentary’ of the book of Romans.
Many years ago, I went through the entire New Testament and carefully studied out each verse in hopes of putting every verse into a (hopefully the original) context. I was trying to get away from using each verse as a simple aphorism and instead concentrate on the question of what was the author trying to argue.
I soon found that I was going to have to spend a lot of time looking up the original Greek and consulting parallel translations when it came to the Pauline epistles.
So I made notes in the margin of a book and now I’m finally putting them into a personal interpretation commentary in Word.
I had thought about sharing them with interested readers on M*. But maybe it would make sense to do this via a collaborative site like you are suggesting with ScriptureLog.
Thanks for your work on this.
Elder McConkie would be impressed.
@Joyace and @Brian
Thanks!
@Bruce
It would be awesome if you could share your notes and commentaries through a collaberative scripture site.
We’ve talked about setting up an M* ScriptureLog at scriptures.millennialstar.org or something, but in order to make sure it doesn’t cause any problems with the main blog it would have to be run as a separate wordpress install.
Once the New Testament has been integrated, I’ll look into that.
Awesome idea, J Max. Keep me posted.
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